Garden of Contentment

In a toxic era, a Hangzhou restaurant pursues purity.

One day in September, I joined the Chinese restaurateur Dai Jianjun for a foraging expedition on a remote mountainside in Zhejiang Province. Ahead of us, our guide, Bao Laichun, cleared a path, hacking at branches with a bamboo-handled machete. The hawthorn trees around us were heavy with fruit, and, amid bamboo groves and tall grasses, birds and grasshoppers sang, butterflies flitted, and vivid beetles crawled on the ground. It was early in the morning, and the mountaintops were still obscured by mist. “You just can’t trust the ingredients you buy in the markets,” Dai told me, battling his way through the undergrowth. “Vegetables laced with chemicals. Fake birds’ nests held together by glue. Even hairy crabs from Yangcheng Lake—most of them are farmed elsewhere and simply made to ‘take a shower’ in the famous lake before they go to market.” Bao vanished into the undergrowth, reappearing halfway up a pine tree that was swathed in a large-leafed vine. He shook the vine to show us the wild kiwifruits that hung from its stems, and began to slash at it, throwing branches to the ground. We plucked off the walnut-size fruits and filled a basket with them. Then we made our way back to Bao’s farmhouse, stopping occasionally to taste wild chestnuts and grapes, and for Bao to dig a wild-lily bulb out of the earth with his knife.

Dai is the owner of the Dragon Well Manor, a restaurant in Hangzhou, the provincial capital. In an age of industrialization, dire pollution, and frequent food scares, the Dragon Well Manor is committed to offering its guests a kind of prelapsarian Chinese cuisine. Dai assures them that everything he serves will be made from natural ingredients, untainted by pesticides or melamine, and with no added MSG. Each morning, his buyers drive out into the countryside to collect the best of the season’s produce. Often they make several trips in a day: a quick dash to a nearby farm to pick up freshly harvested vegetables; a longer journey to inspect a pig or collect a consignment of eggs; an evening excursion for freshwater fish, shrimp, and eels. At other times, they will drive into the mountains, hike for hours, and then stay overnight before returning to Hangzhou with, say, a batch of wild shiitake mushrooms. Dai accompanies them when he feels like it, partly because he enjoys the outing and partly, as he told me with a mischievous grin, to make sure they don’t cheat him by buying produce in a supermarket.

The Manor has never advertised and steers clear of media attention, but it has a devoted following among Zhejiang’s public figures and wealthy businessmen, who come to unwind on the secluded terraces of its landscaped garden before retiring to a private room for a dinner of seasonal delicacies. Guests can look through the “purchase diary,” a large leather-bound volume containing copies of each day’s contracts with the farmers and artisans who supply the kitchens, along with photographs of them picking vegetables, making rice wine, and slaughtering pigs. Dai has never heard of Chez Panisse or Stone Barns, but he is engaged in a similar mission: to guarantee the integrity of his food supplies while shoring up a dying culinary and agricultural heritage.

Dai, now in his fortieth year, is an affable man with a square brow beneath a dark brush of hair, and a cigarette, as often as not, on the go. He grew up in Hangzhou, the son of a low-ranking Communist Party official and a factory worker. Like many of his generation, he was given a good socialist name, Dai Jianjun (Dai Build-the-Army), though these days everyone calls him by the nickname A Dai. An early interest in food was encouraged by his grandmother. “She instilled in me the idea that cooking was about ben wei, the essential tastes of things,” he told me.

Dai spent six years running a restaurant catering to the Hangzhou tourist trade, made a lot of money, and then decided that he wanted to do something more rewarding. “Originally, I just had the idea of creating a landscaped garden, a beautiful place that would showcase the culture of Hangzhou,” he said. “But I needed to find a way to make it pay for itself, which is why I decided that it could also be a restaurant.”

The Lower Yangtze Region, in which Hangzhou lies, has long been a cultural center. The Song-dynasty poet Su Dongpo served as governor of the city in the eleventh century, and since then the region has been associated with the cultivated life of the Chinese literati, scholar-gentlemen who spent their leisure hours writing poetry and conversing in gardens and teahouses. Hangzhou is one of China’s most attractive cities—Marco Polo described it as “without doubt the finest and most splendid city in the world.” It is particularly renowned for its West Lake, whose shores are framed by hills and ornamented with temples and pagodas.

The wider region, encompassing Zhejiang and Jiangsu Provinces, is known as yu mi zhi xiang, “land of fish and rice,” for its fertile soil, easy climate, and plentiful produce. From its lakes, rivers, and canals come not only fish but also eels, crab, and shrimp, as well as aquatic vegetables like water bamboo, water chestnut, and lotus. Bamboo grows in the hills, and rice in the paddy fields; other specialties include water shield—an aquatic herb, from Taihu Lake, near the city of Suzhou—and intensely flavored cured ham from Jinhua. In the fall, people come from all over the Chinese mainland to eat the famous hairy crabs of Yangcheng Lake.

The cooking of the Lower Yangtze Region is subtler and more delicate than Sichuanese or Hunanese cuisines, and its character is more difficult to pinpoint. A renowned chef I met in Hangzhou told me, “Our flavors are as varied as the Sichuanese, but they tend to be light and bright, without that heavy spiciness. We emphasize seasonal produce, and the essential tastes of our raw ingredients.” He pointed out that Hangzhou cooking uses comparatively little oil, salt, sugar, or starch—which, he suggested, makes it healthier than other Chinese cuisines— and that it heeds Confucius’ insistence on fine and delicately cut food.

In 2000, Dai started renting a plot of land on the outskirts of Hangzhou. It was a derelict plant nursery with a few shabby buildings and concrete yards, but it lay amid the picturesque tea fields of the district of Longjing, or Dragon Well. He began landscaping the site, but the restaurant itself started in an ad-hoc manner. “It was really more of a hobby than a business,” he said. “We began by inviting people we knew to taste a few things, and then they recommended the place to their friends.”

We were talking over green tea in his study one afternoon. When Dai is not out with his buyers, managing the restaurant, or socializing with his guests, he retreats to this quiet room, which has its own courtyard and a view of the hills, to read and write or play the guqin, an ancient Chinese zither.

After a year, Dai told me, he closed the restaurant for refurbishment. He hired elderly craftsmen to design and plant the garden, and to construct a series of wood-framed buildings in a broadly traditional Hangzhou style. He became preoccupied with the idea of reviving the dishes known by past generations. He had read the work of Yuan Mei, China’s Brillat-Savarin, an eighteenth-century scholar-gentleman who abandoned his career as an imperial bureaucrat to retire to Nanjing, where he designed his own garden and wrote a seminal cookbook, “Food Lists of the Garden of Contentment.” Although, as an educated man, Yuan Mei probably never cooked himself, he was a meticulous gourmet. He recorded his impressions at dinners in grand houses and collected recipes from Buddhist monasteries. He gave his chefs detailed instructions and quizzed them on culinary practice. He had a dislike of flashy cooking, and once wrote of going home hungry after a forty-dish banquet.

Dai decided that his restaurant would have the kind of Hangzhou dishes that Yuan Mei would have enjoyed, prepared with local ingredients according to the theories of Chinese medicine and the solar terms of the old agricultural calendar. He wanted to serve things that are rare in restaurants: “the nourishing soups given to nursing mothers, humble vegetables, cooling dishes to be eaten in the heat of summer.” He told me that Yuan Mei had insisted that the art of cookery began with the selection of the raw ingredients. “He believed that a chef could take credit for only sixty per cent of the success of a banquet, and that whoever did the shopping should take credit for the rest,” Dai said. “He wrote that just as a stupid person would remain stupid even if taught by Confucius and Mencius, a poor ingredient would be tasteless even if cooked by Yi Ya, the legendary Chinese chef of the Zhou dynasty.”

Dai was also influenced by a booklet he had read about scientific advances and the food of the future. “I came to believe that when you change the life cycle of a plant or an animal you end up with something that is barely the same species,” he said. “I decided that my restaurant would use only traditional produce, free from chemicals and genetic modification.”

In early-twenty-first-century China, Dai had set himself an almost impossible task. Gastronomy, like most aspects of Chinese culture, suffered in the Maoist years. Early Communists associated fine dining with the corrupt excesses of the old regime. In 1927, Mao Zedong witnessed peasant associations in Hunan ban the recreational activities of the wealthy, including banqueting. Mao himself had a lifelong dislike of refined and exotic food, preferring the coarse ingredients and robustly spicy flavors of Hunanese peasant cooking. The nationalization of private business, largely completed by 1956, is remembered as the start of a long decline for China’s restaurants. Later, the Cultural Revolution led to a general assault on bourgeois pastimes, including fine dining. Elderly chefs were taunted by their apprentices, and elegant restaurants were instructed to serve “cheap and substantial food” for the masses.

The spread of monosodium glutamate on the Chinese cookery scene, in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, induced further amnesia about some of the core arts of traditional cooking. MSG, which was identified in seaweed in 1908 by a Japanese scientist and launched as a commercial product soon after, became popular in China at a time when food was short, and basic ingredients were rationed. For people unable to afford meat with their rice, MSG—which is known in Chinese as wei jing, “the essence of flavor”—offered a magical shortcut to umami flavors. By the mid-nineties, it had become an inescapable ingredient in professional kitchens, eclipsing the old skills of making stocks from whole fowl, pork ribs, and dried seafood.

The past decade or two have seen other changes in the way Chinese people eat. As recently as the early nineties, many Chinese lived on a diet of fresh seasonal produce bought from street markets. Supermarkets, refrigerators, and processed foods were rare. Since then, urban sprawl has encroached on arable fields; street markets and small restaurants have been swept away as cities are redeveloped; and Western fast-food chains have opened branches all over the country. Meanwhile, firms such as Carrefour and Tesco have persuaded the middle classes to shop in supermarkets, and processed foods have become widely available. And as the Chinese demand more meat, to supplement their traditional diet of grains and vegetables, there has been a dramatic increase in intensive animal farming.

This sudden elongation of the food chain and the industrialization of food production have been accompanied by an explosion of health scares; the recent scandals of baby milk, chocolate, and eggs tainted by melamine are just the latest. Corruption has obstructed attempts to crack down on rogue food companies; in 2007, the former head of the State Food and Drug Administration was executed for taking bribes and dereliction of duty. Pollution is rife, with widespread contamination of farmland and irrigation water. A recent survey found that food safety was a major concern of the Chinese public.

Inevitably, there is a growing market for lü se shi pin, “green food products,” for which newly affluent consumers are willing to pay a premium. Some restaurants offer dishes made with “pollution-free” pork raised in Tibet or wild mushrooms from supposedly pristine forests. Specialist tea companies sell leaves from plantations that are purportedly far from the fallout of factory chimneys. But, with a rampant black market in fake products of every description, it is hard to know which claims to believe.

For Dai, the only solution was to cut out the middlemen and source his own ingredients from producers. “My family thought I was crazy, trying to buy everything from the countryside—my mother told me I’d go bankrupt!” he said. “Most of our farmers can’t supply us in any great quantity, so we have to buy from many different households. We have perhaps two hundred suppliers for vegetables alone. I don’t even know what the total number is, but I guess it must be three or four thousand.”

There is no main dining room at the Dragon Well Manor. Instead, it has eight private rooms, each with its own terrace, scattered in pavilions around the garden. They are furnished in the spare style of the Ming dynasty, with framed paintings and calligraphy on the walls. The restaurant is almost always fully booked, and each of its two daily seatings—lunch and dinner—can accommodate no more than eighty-eight people. The staff numbers just over a hundred: cooks, waitresses, buyers, administrators, gardeners, and runners to carry the covered dishes from kitchen to dining room. The restaurant has no à la carte menu: customers decide how much they want to spend and let the kitchens send out whatever is good that day.

“We have seventeen cooks,” Dai said. “In a normal restaurant, the same number would be expected to serve more than thirty tables. But although we are expensive by local standards, we are by no means at the top of the range. Our cheapest set menu works out at around three hundred yuan a head”—about forty-five dollars. “If people pay more, we will give them luxuries like the last baby chestnuts of the season. By now, we do manage to cover our running costs and our taxes, but I’ll never recoup my investment. But then I don’t do it for money. I’m content just to feed people who really appreciate what we do.”

Dai’s main worry is that traditional farming and cooking won’t survive another generation. During two weeks that I spent in Hangzhou, in two different seasons, I accompanied him on visits to half a dozen or so rural suppliers, and in almost every household the parents and grandparents were keeping up the family farms, while the children had left for the cities. One fisherman who provides most of the restaurant’s fish and shrimp quipped that his son was more interested in shang wang—surfing the Internet—than in san wang: casting a fishing net. The oldest supplier is ninety-three years old.

Dai sees himself as a custodian of traditional skills. “My senior chefs are all officially retired workers, but they are teaching the younger chefs how to cook without MSG,” he said. “And when this place was built I made sure that there were younger workers around who could learn from the old master craftsmen.” He dreams of one day opening a self-sustaining farm where schoolchildren can learn about the origins of what they eat. “In the past, everyone who grew up in the countryside knew how to raise pigs and fowl, and understood the old agricultural calendar,” he said. “But things have developed so quickly, and we are losing touch with our traditions.” Still, he is aware of the limitations of his project. “We can only do this on a small scale,” he told me as we finished our tea. “China has so many people, and so little land. If everyone tried to eat this way, there wouldn’t be enough food to go around. But we must try to sustain our agricultural lore and culinary skills for future generations.”

After our exertions in pursuit of wild kiwifruit that day, we returned to our guide Bao Laichun’s farmhouse. Dai and I sat at a table in the living room with his chief buyer, Zhou Guofu, who is also his maternal uncle. Bao handed cigarettes to all the men while his wife brought us green tea. It was an old-fashioned mud-brick farmhouse on the brink of a spectacular valley. Silk gourds hung amid yellow blossoms from a vine on the terrace, and water collected in a stone vat fed by a mountain stream. The family’s vegetable plot was a patchwork of crops: peanuts and soya, maize and rape. Bao’s work foraging for Dai supplements his income as a bamboo transporter. His wife runs a free-range-chicken farm, supplying eggs and birds to the restaurant’s kitchens.

“Sourcing our ingredients was a nightmare at first,” Zhou said. The buyers spent months driving out to remote villages, meeting farmers, and trying to set up a network of suppliers. They commissioned peasants to rear free-range chickens and ducks, to feed pigs a traditional diet of grain and vegetables, and to sow their fields according to the solar terms of the old agricultural calendar. Through word of mouth, they found people who were prepared to gather wild lily flowers, to catch paddy eels and turtles. “But we were groping in the dark,” Zhou said. “And sometimes the peasants deceived us, passing off factory-farmed pork as home-raised meat, or using chemicals on the sly.”

According to Dai, even his own buyers were at first so irritated by his stringent demands that they sometimes did their shopping in regular markets. He began to insist on visible proof that they’d really bought from peasant producers—a requirement that eventually gave rise to the photographs and contracts displayed in the restaurant’s purchase diary. Gradually, he persuaded his staff to take his project as seriously as he did, and they managed to iron out many of their early problems. “We learned to look for insect bites in our greens, a sign that they were free of pesticides, and to tell the difference between factory-farmed and farm-raised pork,” Zhou said, adding that relations with suppliers have become friendly. “We pay them a premium, so they are willing to give us what we want.”

We gathered around the table for lunch in the warm sunlight that streamed through the open front door of the farmhouse. Bao’s daughter brought out the dishes from the kitchen, one by one. The vegetables were all homegrown or foraged, and cooked in home-pressed rapeseed oil. There was water bamboo, stir-fried on a wood-burning stove with a little sliced pork and a dash of Shaoxing wine; pumpkin leaves with chili and garlic; celery with pressed bean curd; sesame greens, a wild vegetable with an herbal taste; sweetpotato stalks with chili and garlic; silk gourd with pork and chili; and a potful of guo ba fan, an old farmhouse favorite of steamed rice with a crisp golden crust.

I complimented our hosts and asked if this was the kind of food they normally ate. They assured me that it was, and Dai hooted with laughter. “What complete rubbish!” he said. “I know perfectly well you wouldn’t eat sweet-potato stalks and pumpkin leaves by choice! You’re only serving them to humor me.” He turned to me. “As far as they are concerned, this is just the stuff they feed to their animals! They are just too polite to say so—they don’t want to admit that they are serving pig food to their honored foreign guest.” He turned to Bao and his wife and asked, “Isn’t that true?”

The couple smiled with embarrassment and admitted that this was so. Everyone laughed. And later that afternoon, when we arrived at our next stop, to inspect a pig due for slaughter later in the week, the lady of the house was sitting on the kitchen floor, chopping up sweet-potato stalks for the doomed animal’s dinner.

On another day, I went to visit the Dragon Well Manor’s head chef, Dong Jinmu, a gruff-voiced man with thick eyebrows and a dry sense of humor. He began by giving me a tour of the kitchens. We watched two elderly brothers grind soybeans in a hand-turned mill, and then boil the soy milk in a wok over an old-fashioned wood-burning stove. According to Dong, when Dai opened the restaurant, he persuaded the men to move their entire village bean-curd workshop into his garden. Now they make fresh soy milk and bean curd every day. Dong himself had a hand in building their stove. “We sacrificed a large cockerel in the traditional way, cutting its head off and splashing blood over the site,” he told me.

It was early in the morning, and in the main kitchen younger chefs were cutting up vegetables and butchering pork. On either side, there were smaller rooms: one for making cold dishes, one for soups and stews, another for pressing fruit juices. In a prep room, shelves were stacked with entire Jinhua hams, as well as with huge winter melons, pumpkins, and an assortment of vegetables. Dried bamboo shoots soaked in a large basin on the floor. A little farther away, in an outbuilding open to the yard, several women were plucking and cleaning chickens.

Before coming to Dragon Well, Chef Dong worked for forty years at Louwailou, Hangzhou’s most famous restaurant. Dai approached him after his retirement, realizing that he would be a repository of disappearing recipes and skills, and also recruited two other retired chefs, Guo Ming and Yang Aiping. But even these three initially struggled with Dai’s rigorous approach to traditional methods. Dong thought that dispensing with MSG would be commercially disastrous, but Dai insisted, and Chef Dong started once again to make the rich stocks that his old shifu (master chef) had taught him during his apprentice years, in the nineteen-sixties.

As the lunchtime service started, Dong and Guo went to their wok stations. Guo was making soups and stir-fries that included peasant dishes like scrambled eggs with chives, while Dong took charge of red-braised dishes and banquet delicacies. “Taste a bit of this,” he said, handing me a sample of golden liquid from a bowl at his side. It was an elixir of dried scallops and chicken, their flavors marvellously distilled, that he uses to enhance and enrich his soups and sauces. And then he offered me a taste of a sauce in a simmering potful of red-braised fish tails, an astonishing wine-dark liquid. This is what people mean, I thought, when they say “depth of flavor.” The taste was like gazing into a deep, ancient pool.

In the early evening, I joined one of the restaurant’s reception staff, Qian Lu, on a terrace overlooking a pond, and we lay back on bamboo seats, sipping Dragon Well tea and eating nuts and dried fruits. Boulders had been strewn here and there with artful artlessness, and lotus leaves tilted drowsily in the water. At dusk, a woman had begun to play the guzheng, a large zither, under a canopy on a little island in the pond. The low hills of Longjing rose all around. Listening to the music, gazing out over the pond, and chatting with Qian Lu, who was wearing a pale silk qi pao embroidered with flowers, I felt that I had been transported into the world of the great eighteenth-century novel “Dream of the Red Chamber,” whose author, Cao Xueqin, was from the Lower Yangtze Region. Then Qian Lu took a call from Dai on her wristwatch cell phone. “These qi pao don’t have pockets, so we can’t carry normal cell phones,” she said.

At dinnertime, we joined Dai, his uncle Zhou, and some friends in one of the private dining rooms, a hall with wooden pillars supporting raftered ceilings. A large round table in the center of the room was laid with fine blue-and-white china, made to order in China’s ancient porcelain capital, Jingdezhen.

A waitress served us fresh warm soy milk, seasoned with soy sauce, preserved mustard tuber, pieces of deep-fried dough stick, paper-thin dried shrimp, and chopped scallion. It was the kind of dish that makes a Hangzhou person sigh. It’s rare, nowadays, to find such stone-ground soy milk. Even in the villages, people have discarded their old stone querns and use electric mills instead.

The meal began with a selection of appetizers: crisp young ginger, pickled in a sweet-sour marinade; slices of pressed bean curd made by the elderly brothers and bathed in a luxurious stock; the wild sesame greens we’d shared with Farmer Bao; tiny cucumbers, picked that morning, with a dip of sweet fermented sauce; crunchy jellyfish with local rice vinegar. Waitresses in qi pao and pearls poured us glasses of freshly pressed juice: yellow peach and wild kiwi, from the fruit we’d helped to gather.

There were echoes of dishes I had tasted at the restaurant earlier in the year, but much was different. Loquats, whose juice we had drunk in May, were no longer available, and the season for wild shrimp was past. And at the end of this, my second stay in Hangzhou, I realized that I really had seen the origins of much of what I ate. Our first main course was a stir-fry of tender chicken with tiny chestnuts, so young they were still crisp and yellow: visiting the farm where the chicken had been raised, I had been scratched by the bristles of wild chestnuts. There was red-braised belly pork with dried bamboo shoots, the meat as dark as molasses and so soft you could sink a chopstick into the flesh: I had heard the shrieks of the pig, seen its throat slit and its blood thunder into a basin, and tasted its flesh, poached in water, barely half an hour later. And in the fragrance of the dish was the memory of a Shaoxing wine factory where I had wandered among the stacked wine jars, sealed with lotus leaves and clay.

A waitress entered and laid a soup tureen on the table. She announced the dish as wu ming ying xiong—“nameless heroes.” Steam rose from a milky broth, in which a carp rested in the silky folds of bamboo-pith fungus. Scarlet wolfberries and sliced scallion were scattered on top, like jewels on pale flesh. The waitress ladled the soup into small bowls, each with a piece of fish and a lacy morsel of fungus. The liquid was xian, richly savory, replete with delicious fish flavors, and yet the fish itself was not overcooked. Dai explained that this was a gongfu cai, an “art” dish, whose elaborate preparation was invisible in the simplicity of its final appearance. Small crucian carp were used for the broth, simmered for their flavor and then discarded. The whole carp in front of us had been poached, briefly, in their stock. “So you see,” Dai said, “the vanished crucian carp are the dish’s ‘nameless heroes.’ ”

After the meal was over, I walked back through the garden, to the gate where Zhou, the buyer, was waiting to take me home. Fragments of conversation and laughter drifted from hidden terraces, and a few lights shone among the trees. I wandered over the stone bridges, through the shadows of willow and winter plum. Osmanthus trees were in bloom, and the night air was filled with their honeyed fragrance. ♦